


Difficult

by narsus



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Implied Incest, Implied Relationships, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-14
Updated: 2010-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-13 04:58:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narsus/pseuds/narsus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emotions can be difficult: Lestrade posits that that doesn’t have to be the case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Difficult

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Sherlock belongs to the BBC, Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat, and obviously in the genesis of it all, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Waking comes easily and for some reason Sherlock’s certain that it hasn’t been that way for days. He’s lying flat on his back, completely naked beneath the duvet that’s slipped down during the night, so that it’s the cold air against his throat that’s woken him. This isn’t his bed of course. His own sheets aren’t quite so carefully arranged or curiously smooth. The duvet is thicker than he’s use to and the sheets are of the sort of thread count that make them luxurious without being ostentatious.

“What are you smiling about?”  
“Everything. Come back to bed.”

He’s feeling gloriously mild this morning, relaxed and at ease in a wholly unfamiliar fashion. He could, he supposes, learn to get use to it, even the wriggling sideways to allow his partner to get back into bed.

“So, what _did_ you take then?”

Rolling over, Sherlock splays a hand out across his companion’s chest rather than answer. There’s a decent amount of hair there, enough to fit Western masculine perceptions, without being too hirsute. He combs his fingers through the thatch of hair: there’s only a smattering of grey.

“Sherlock.” It’s an admonishment.  
“Nothing.”  
“You’re telling me that the reason you turned up on my doorstep, distraught, in the middle of the night, _wasn’t_ due to drugs?”  
“You wouldn’t have slept with me if it had been.”  
“Point.”

That line of questioning is predictable. It wouldn’t do for a police inspector to have slept with someone much too far under the influence to give informed consent, despite any latent attraction between them.

“It was...” Sherlock trails off, unsure of what he wants to say, or, if he can even be bothered to say it.  
“Let me guess: you and John had a fight.”  
“No.”

Older detective inspectors aren’t meant to be curiously attractive. He’d found it unnerving when they’d first begun their association, and then it had annoyed him. One of the few sensible officers of Scotland Yard shouldn’t be attractive in the slightest. It was a distraction and something that the Met ought to do something about.

“So... you didn’t have a spat and what? You just decided to turn up at my door?”  
“No.” Oddly he doesn’t feel like adding the reflexive ‘don’t be stupid’ this time.  
A sigh. “You’re going to have to give me more than that to work with.”  
“We could have sex again.”

There’s hardly anything amazingly attractive about a mere detective inspector anyway. There’s nothing interesting about the tired lines around his eyes or the fact that duty has worn down his smile. The short grey hair is conventional, boring. The clothing equally dull. The mouth... nothing to note until, one day, it had turned up into that quick, conspiratorial smirk. Then his eyes had shown a flash of, not brilliance, but wickedness. _That_ had been intriguing.

“No.”  
“What do you mean ‘no’?” Sherlock pushes himself upright and looks down to meet a rather stern stare.  
“No. Look, Sherlock, if this is-“  
“I told you, this isn’t anything to do with John.”

Sherlock lies back down abruptly, laying his head on Lestrade’s chest. Lestrade whom Sherlock is determined to always call ‘Lestrade’ even in his own head, least he slip and reveal a more intimate fascination with the man in public. Lestrade’s hand tangles in his hair and Sherlock immediately regrets not explaining himself further. It’s not a feeling he’s use to in the slightest.

“So, what was it?”  
“John actually.”

The hand in his hair stills, the body he’s resting against, tensing.

“Not like that.”

For a moment Lestrade’s hand tightens in his hair, then, there’s a sharp exhale as the inspector regains control of himself.

“John and I, we aren’t.”  
“No?”  
“No.”  
“But this is... to do with him?”  
“Moderately.”

That admission is greeted with silence. It makes Sherlock wonder if he’s deliberately being difficult, as Mycroft so often accuses. But G- _Lestrade_ , he corrects himself. Lestrade is owed an explanation.

“My brother... and John. I...” Sherlock curls his hands into fists. “...didn’t mean to.” He finishes lamely.  
“You walked in on them?”  
“Well, John was ill, I thought- I was just going to...”

Lestrade is stroking his hair again, soothingly. Sherlock relaxes and knows that he won’t have to say anything else. He won’t be forced to explain the sight of John laughing conspiratorially with his brother, won’t have to explain that John _was_ ill and was curled up beneath the bedcovers, that Mycroft was sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard as if he belonged there. He won’t have to explain that he doesn’t understand what’s evidently a reference, a joke that normal people ought to recognise, that had Mycroft giggling in a terribly fake French accent: “But, _John_ , I do not want to be fat.”

Lestrade laughs, a little falsely, a little self-consciously. “At least I’m not a replacement.” It doesn’t sound like a joke at all.  
Sherlock laughs, a short, almost bitter bark of sound, at himself, at the both of them and their insecurities. “You were here first.”  
“Was I?”  
“Yes. Always.”  
“Good.” Lestrade sounds gruff as he says it.

In the end that’s the truth of it. Lestrade _was_ there first and John was, is, a companion along on an adventure. In another lifetime Sherlock supposes he might have wanted... whatever it is he has with Lestrade, with John instead. He closes his eyes and listens to Lestrade’s heartbeat before he can follow that thought further. Eventually it will be enough to drown out the odd feeling of rejection he’d felt last night. It’s the same ache that he’d felt the first time he’d seen Mycroft leaning in close and talking quietly, confidentially, with another boy. He’d been all of fourteen at the time, and that feeling of loss, of pervading, constant, unquenchable sorrow had swallowed him whole.

“You know, if you ever need to-”  
“No. Never.” Sherlock squeezes his eyes shut tightly.  
“Talk about it, is what I was going to say.”  
“Oh.”  
“I wasn’t going to recommend you read The Ethical Slut and then start giving it a go.”  
“The what?” Sherlock sits up abruptly.  
Lestrade sits up as well, more slowly, and runs a hand over his hair in a familiar gesture of embarrassment.  
“Tell me.” Sherlock leans in.  
“How about that sex first?”

Afterwards, Sherlock sits up in bed, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, flicking through the book in question.

“Is there, we wonder, some virtue in being difficult?” He reads aloud.  
“Not in the slightest.” Lestrade says, lighting a cigarette for himself.  
“I wouldn’t be interested in your cases if they were easy.”  
“Ah, but there’s the difference.”  
“How so?”  
“The difficult cases are a challenge. You test yourself with them.”  
Sherlock taps the ash off the end of his cigarette into the ashtray on the bed, but doesn’t reply.  
“There’s a difference between a challenge and difficulty just for difficulty’s sake. One is testing yourself, the other is-“  
“Idiocy.” Sherlock concedes.  
“Pretty much.”

Sherlock closes the book and stares at the rather garish cover. Lestrade has a point. Difficult cases are challenges, and challenges are meant to be surmounted. Difficult feelings, likewise, are things to be understood rather than just held up as difficult and incomprehensible.

“I’m jealous.” Sherlock admits.  
“That’s a start.”

Lestrade sides an arm around Sherlock’s waist, and Sherlock leans back against him. Suddenly the challenge doesn’t seem quite so insurmountable at all. Of course he doesn’t know how any of it will resolve, and he certainly doesn’t know how Mycroft will take a declaration that Sherlock is attracted to... both of them. But that’s just part of the puzzle. Sherlock needs more data before he can start theorising and it would be an absolute failure on his part to attempt to come to conclusions before he is in full possession of the facts.

“You’re not an idiot.” Sherlock says, because it seems important that he say it aloud.  
“Good.”  
“I’d like to have sex with you again.”  
“Right now?”  
“After breakfast? And then maybe later.”  
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?” Lestrade chuckles.  
Sherlock recognises the quote, vaguely, as something he couldn’t be bothered to remember.  
“It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Lestrade continues, kissing Sherlock’s neck as he finishes the recitation.  
“Where does...?”  
Lestrade takes the cigarette from Sherlock’s hand and stubs it out. “Macbeth.” He murmurs.  
“I didn’t know.”

Sherlock isn’t surprised as Lestrade moves the ashtray to the side table, then turns back to him, in a smooth economy of movement, and proceeds to ease him back down onto the bed. Somehow it seems inevitable. Lestrade is anything but a fool. He’s perhaps the best of a conventionally bad lot, so Sherlock often tells himself. The police force is hampered by men and women who cling to convention and routine, they miss the details, the facts, the real evidence constantly. They fill up their minds with trivia and yet...

“Stop it.”  
Sherlock opens his mouth to reply.  
“Stop thinking.” Lestrade whispers against his parted lips.

Obediently, inevitably, Sherlock does just that. His last fleeting thought being that there might be reasonable enough virtue in making some things less than difficult.

**Author's Note:**

> ’...In the meantime, here is the menu and the wine list and you must choose what will make you happy and fat.’ And she would look relieved at not having to try anymore, and she would laugh and say: ‘But, James, I do not want to be fat.’  
> \- Ian Flemming’s _From a View to A Kill_
> 
>  _The Ethical Slut_ by Dossie Easton  & Catherine Liszt is a much cited introduction to polyamory text. The cover art suggests that Lestrade has the 1st edition.
> 
> The Shakespeare quotations comes from the famous soliloquy in _Macbeth_ , Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28.


End file.
